KBD47 wrote:Here is why I opted for MATE instead of Cinnamon: Cinnamon menu is slow, and Cinnamon in general feels slower than MATE. I can add applets like hardware temp and weather in seconds to MATE, not a noob easy task in Cinnamon. Overall Cinnamon feels like it has a long way to go just to catch up to a mature desktop like Gnome 2/MATE. Having said that, I still think Cinnamon is miles ahead of Unity and Gnome Shell regarding usability.kbd47

How do you choose between the two? I am finding that the Cinnamon/MATE version of the LMDE to be significantly slower than the Xfce version too, so I'm looking to cut down on its footprint as much as possible.

wshyang wrote:How do you choose between the two? I am finding that the Cinnamon/MATE version of the LMDE to be significantly slower than the Xfce version too, so I'm looking to cut down on its footprint as much as possible.

Well, I don't think you would go wrong to install Xfce alongside of MATE, use both, and see which you ultimately prefer. They seem to play well together, you just need to tell Xfce which file manager to use and you are set.

Actually, I like Cinnamon quite a bit. Admittedly, I haven't really pushed it hard yet. I agree with Strangland's post of May 12 - the one thing I've found rather annoying is the delay of 2-3 seconds for the menu to appear after I first click it on startup & from time to time thereafter. I would imagine this will be addressed at some point in the near future, given that Cinnamon is a work in progress.

Apart from that, most of my problems are probably more a matter of 'user ignorance', e.g. how to customize a theme to just the way I'd like it, probably best solved by further experimentation.

personally what I don't like about cinnamon is that its mintmenu takes about 3s to start

though I do like that I can just press [Return] and execute/open my search queries' results (which can't be done in MATE mintmenu)

also, there are some programs that just won't run correctly in cinnamon but do so in MATEit's a couple of games, like HoN, some menus on applications like Netbeans, and that with some applications the window becomes bigger than the max resoution of my screen or gets somewhere away from the screen and not in another desktop

and I tried on intel graphics cards to see if it was my AMD one, but it's a cinnamon thing, not the graphics card

As others have said, I don't like the delay when clicking on the menu icon or when closing some applications (e.g. system monitor takes a few seconds to close). I also agree that the menu sort of seems to have a mind of its own at times, duplicating applications, putting them in the wrong place, and sometimes not doing what I tell it to do. Granted, I remember having that happen sometimes with Gnome 2 as well.

Another general concern is that you still can't tweak the system-wide color schemes or window borders like you could with Gnome 2 and you can with MATE currently, or if it is possible to do so, I don't know of a user-friendly method. I like some of the themes available to us, but I miss the ability to easily customize the appearance to the way I want. This was one of the things I really loved about Ubuntu when I switched over from Windows a few years back.

All that said, I'm a huge fan of Cinnamon and use it over MATE. Last time I tried MATE, it didn't snap windows to the side of the screen when you drag them to the side like you can do in win7 or Cinnamon, and it wouldn't maximize a window when I dragged it to the top. That''s an extremely important feature from a productivity standpoint for me.

I agree that the lack of a power manager is a major weakness for Cinnamon.

On two different computers I've had Cinnamon slow down enormously when multiple displays were used. MATE never has this problem.

Cinnamon is visually more appealing--and I very much appreaciate out-of-the-box integration for the Super/Windows key--but MATE just seems to work better with various kinds of software and hardware. Nothing specific I can name now, but that's been my impression.

Menu it's slow. If pass mouse over different items, is a noticeable delay in response. Processor in this situation got about 40% in usage. Only for menu navigation.The overall is good. I will continue to use. Maybe eventual updates will solve the speed issues.

Kikito wrote:I don't dislike CInnamon at all. However, if I had to single out one (or two) places where to me it falls behind Gnome Shell, it's in the integration of the messaging app into the notification bar, and the ability to view your calendar schedule from the desktop. Those two really put GS at the top for me right now.

Yup. Messaging and calendar integration. I think maybe in the process of Gnome2ifying everything some of the advances in Gnome Shell were thrown out with the bath water. It feels very old school not to have proper messaging and calendar integration.

Thank you for this thread. That’s all I can say. You most definitely have made this forum into something special. You clearly know what you are doing, you’ve covered so many bases. Thanks!

vlad2005 wrote:Menu it's slow. If pass mouse over different items, is a noticeable delay in response. Processor in this situation got about 40% in usage. Only for menu navigation.The overall is good. I will continue to use. Maybe eventual updates will solve the speed issues.

There is a good chance this is a theme issue - what theme do you use?

Thank you for this thread. That’s all I can say. You most definitely have made this forum into something special. You clearly know what you are doing, you’ve covered so many bases. Thanks!

bimsebasse wrote:Yup. Messaging and calendar integration. I think maybe in the process of Gnome2ifying everything some of the advances in Gnome Shell were thrown out with the bath water. It feels very old school not to have proper messaging and calendar integration.

I agree 100%. Also, the other feature I miss from Gnome Shell is the overlay view with Zeitgeist (don't remember if that was standard or an extension, though). Since Cinnamon is very young, I'm confident will surely see messaging and calendar integration back, while it might be more difficult to restore a search overlay view (since the current overlay is limited to windows/workspaces handling).

was just playing with cinnamon trying to decide if i want to roll it out.. and noticed font rendering isn't nearly as clear as Gnome2 or Gnome-classic. whichever theme i select, fonts look like what they are, which is texture mapped 3d right?this is quite serious really.is this just my open source radeon driver or am i missing something? i can't see how filtered 3d is ever going to be a crisp for fonts as a traditionally drawn 2d desktop? might try on nvidia desktop later to see if that's better. but i had a "why are we doing this in 3d anyway?" moment.

but gnome classsic included in Mint13 Cinnamon (which is Gnome 3.4.1 i think? at least that's what system monitor told me) looked fine to me, pretty much same as Gnome2. I haven't tried any other 3d rendered desktops to know if it's just Cinnamon that looks bad or e.g. if Unity or KDE (?) would look the same.

also, the themes applied to cinnamon really don't mesh with the window manager fonts.. it makes the desktop and panels look really out of place against the windows/apps. in Gnome2 when you changed a theme, generally that affected fonts across the whole system.

so right now i can't see why i shouldn't just use Gnome-classic for all users (the fallback in Cinnamon edition) need to do some more reading to learn if there's any downside to this. http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/03/gnom ... r-changed/i presume this is same as what both Mint 13 main editions come with, just a different layout.

Smiff2 wrote:also, the themes applied to cinnamon really don't mesh with the window manager fonts.. it makes the desktop and panels look really out of place against the windows/apps. in Gnome2 when you changed a theme, generally that affected fonts across the whole system.

That's the way it goes now. Fonts are chosen by theme's author. You want your favourite font, you do something like this.

Smiff2 wrote:so right now i can't see why i shouldn't just use Gnome-classic for all users (the fallback in Cinnamon edition) need to do some more reading to learn if there's any downside to this.

No mintMenu. No any other Gnome 2/MATE applets. Possible demise of this mode once things are settled with running Gnome Shell/Cinnamon with software renderer.If you like this mode, take a look at this thread (warning: it's about a different distro and won't help solving any issues in Mint ).

Cinnamon lacks the panel launchers, so it's not very efficient. MATE has panels, so that's the way I go.

How it looks doesn't matter so much to me, as long as it works and is FAST. One click should be all that's needed to launch often-used programs, so the panels is the right place for the icons; the screen background is the worst, since they are hidden by windows.

The menu could be better too; I hate the search-find-click method. After all, when I know what I want, I want it NOW.

If I could install panels in Cinnamon, I might consider using it, or at least testing it more. So is it possible?

ingeva wrote:Cinnamon lacks the panel launchers, so it's not very efficient. MATE has panels, so that's the way I go.

How it looks doesn't matter so much to me, as long as it works and is FAST. One click should be all that's needed to launch often-used programs, so the panels is the right place for the icons; the screen background is the worst, since they are hidden by windows.

The menu could be better too; I hate the search-find-click method. After all, when I know what I want, I want it NOW.

If I could install panels in Cinnamon, I might consider using it, or at least testing it more. So is it possible?

The last time I used cinnamon, which has been a couple months, it had panels. You could also add launchers to the panel. The menu was organized into categories, too. Maybe you're thinking of gnome-shell.

Cinnamon has panels, just right-click an application in the menu and you get to choose to add it to your favourites, your panel or your desktop

Note that if your graphics card driver doesn't support 3D hardware acceleration, you will drop to Cinnamon "fallback" mode where you will miss those features. If you have a light gray panel, with the menu button only a Linux Mint icon and not the word "Menu" on it, you are in fallback mode. You will have to install a different graphics card driver. BTW, Cinnamon is under heavy development and this is a temporary fallback. Latest versions of Cinnamon support "Cinnamon 2D", where hardware acceleration is not needed anymore.